Here is how the reputation system works:
If you give someone positive reputation points, he'll get a certain value added to his reputation. The number of points you are able to add to a member's reputation is called your reputation power.
Your reputation power depends on
- when you signed up (the earlier you joined the forum, the larger your power),
- your number of posts (the more posts you have, the larger your power), and
- the number of reputation points you have already accumulated (the more rep points you have, the larger your reputation power.)
When we upgraded the forum software to vB 3 last year (which introduced the reputation system), I adjusted the default settings, so that it doesn't take that long to accumulate a reasonable level of reputation.
As a consequence, however, the reputation points soon exploded. Once a relatively high level of reputation was achieved, it turned into an avalanche what is pretty self-explanatory if people can distribute ever more rep points the more rep points they have themselves.
You can compare that with the rep points on Stormfront which upgraded to vB 3 at about the same time. Nobody has even close the number of rep points people on Skadi have. vBulletin doesn't even add additional green display dots for rep scores higher than 1,500; a score considered insane and unreachable even on the largest boards after years of use with the default settings.
To get this explosion at least somewhat under control, we adjusted the reputation point settings again several weeks or a couple of months ago: people now get less rep power to spend on others.
This, however, is a disadvantage for newer members, as they couldn't participate in the rep point baby boom what makes the system now a bit skew.
There is, unfortunately, no function provided by vBulletin that would permit us to recalculate the received rep points based on the new settings.
What we could do is either
- leave the rep points as they are, or
- reset them to a certain base value (let's say 10 as it is the default for new members) for everyone, i. e. start all over.
There is actually no function for the latter either but this could be done simply by executing a single mySQL query, replacing the value of the rep point field with 10 for all members in the table, and takes a few seconds.
Comments given so far would not be lost.
Furthermore, there has been a dispute whether the comments should be public or not.
There are different options:
- make them semi-private, i. e. only moderators and the recipient can read them,
- make them public but don't display either in public or to the recipient who made the comment, or
- make them public but don't display in public who made the comment; allow the recipient to see who made the comment, and
- make them public and display who made the comment publicly (as we have now.)
There is no way to make them completely private, i. e. to bar moderators from reviewing them.
Tell us what you think, please, and vote in the poll.
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